Discourse
On this website...
- Discourse analysis - an introduction (below)
- Syllabi and materials - for teaching Discourse Analysis
- Student information - for European University Viadrina seminars on discourse analysis
- Academic Writing - guidance for submitting articles to journals or writing other papers
- Details - about www.discourse-analysis.de
Discourse Analysis.What is it?
Discourse is a term becoming increasingly common in a wide range of academic and non-academic contexts. Sometimes it can seem as if each time it is used, it means something different.
First, what is discourse, and what relation does it have to language? Within linguistics, discourse is often described as “language-in-use” or “socially situated text and talk”, i.e., analysts ask how written, oral and visual texts are used in specific contexts to make meanings, as opposed to analysing language-as-an-abstract-system. Other disciplines (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, media studies) tend to use the term to mean what is ‘sayable’ or ‘thinkable’ about a topic in any given political, social, historical, cultural context.
One way of conceptualising these two sets of approaches is to ask the question “Which is bigger – language or discourse?” (as Alistair Pennycook did in 1994). In linguistics, language is bigger: discourses occur within language. Zellig Harris (one of Chomsky’s teachers) paved the way for linguists to analyse language above the sentence level, calling this unit of analysis ‘discourse’ (e.g., paragraphs, essays, interviews). Analysis therefore focuses on language in use, the relation of language to context and the relations of cohesion within a text.
In socio-political approaches, discourse is bigger than language: Michel Foucault is often referred to; discourse is seen as a system of power/knowledge, situated in a specific time and space. Analysis focuses on the production of knowledge, i.e., that which is understood to be truth or reality. It asks what is sayable (natural, normal, unquestioned) and how is it sayable in this particular context. These approaches share a social constructionist orientation with analysts referring to, among others, Michel Foucault, Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwik Fleck and Edward Said as inspiration.
What all discourse analyses share is their basis in texts, however broadly ‘text’ is defined. Beyond written texts and multi-modal texts (TV, advertising, internet, etc.), discourse analysts also consider the textuality of talk, cities, bodies, buildings and music. Some analyses flow over many books and historical archives, whereas others do fine-grained analysis of a small number of texts.
A selection of approaches to discourse analysis:
- Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
- Sociocognitive Discourse Studies
- Political Discourse Analysis
- Discursive Psychology
- Conversational Analysis
- Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory
Recommended introductory books
Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction.
Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis.
Lillis, T., &
Phillips, L., & Jørgensen, M. W. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method.
Wetherell, M.,
Wetherell, M.,
For more on "which is bigger - language or discourse?"
Pennycook, A. (1994). Incommensurable discourses? Applied Linguistics, 15(2), 115-138.